The present disclosure relates generally to information handling systems, and more particularly to Fibre Channel Forwarder (FCF) traffic routing by information handling systems.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Some information handling systems provide a Fibre Channel (FC) Storage Area Network (SAN) for the storage of data. In such systems, an FC switch may be utilized to couple the FC SAN to servers via a Fibre Channel Forwarder (FCF) that performs FC over Ethernet (FCoE)-to-FC protocol conversions on Ethernet communications sent from the servers to the FC SAN, as well as FC-to-FCoE protocol conversions on FC communications sent from the FC SAN to the servers. Such FCFs allow for servers that communicate via the Ethernet protocol to utilize FC SANs that communicate via the FC protocol. However, the conventional functionality of such FCFs raises a number of issues.
For example, servers in such systems may utilize a Converged Network Adapter (CNA) to communicate with an N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) Proxy Gateway (NPG) in the FCF in order to provide login communication for logging into the FC SAN, with the FCF converting those login communications and the NPG providing them to the FC switch in order to log the server into the FC SAN. After logging servers into the FC SAN, the FCF may forward traffic from those servers to the FC switch. The FC switch may then route the traffic to the FC SAN using Fibre Channel identifiers (FCIDs) that are included in the traffic and that were assigned to the node ports (N_Ports) of the servers and the FCF device during fabric login. In conventional systems, all traffic received at the FCF is required to be routed by the FC switch. Thus, when a server provides traffic to the FCF and the destination of that traffic is also connected to the FCF, the traffic is first forwarded to the FC switch to perform the routing as discussed above to provide the traffic back to the FCF, which then provides the traffic to the destination device. This creates a “traffic tromboning” effect which causes a number of issues such as inefficient traffic paths that introduce latency with the traffic, congestion between the FCF and the FC switch, and other undesirable traffic characteristics.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved FCF routing system.